More important, what consistent language mistakes will he or she make?

  According to Tom Spanbauer, his teacher Gordon Lish called this calculated flawed language “burnt tongue.” Lish advocated that stories should not sound as if they’ve been written by a writer. Stories have greater authority if they’re delivered with the same passion and flawed language that an actual person would use telling the emotion-laden truth.

  So if writing from within a character, you should “burn” the language. Customize it to the speaker. Even when writing in third person, make the language reflect the character’s perspective and experience.

  To all of Spanbauer’s and Lish’s advice, I’d just add: Make language your bitch.

  Create a pidgin language for your character. Look how successfully it works in David Sedaris’s collection Me Talk Pretty One Day. Or in my own novel Pygmy and my short story “Eleanor.” Not to mention Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Readers have so many ways of determining meaning in a sentence. They look at context as well as words. So it’s a great trick to subvert reader expectation by writing a long, elegant passage that ends flatly on exactly the wrong word.

  Early in the publishing process an editor told me that most successful copy editors learned English as a second language. They studied scrupulously what most Americans learned haphazardly. The result is that they know exactly where to place every comma, and how to use a semicolon, and they’re trained to iron out the mis-phrasings that keep narrative voice fresh and authentic.

  The idiot character is more fun to hear because he bends the language for his purpose. So does the ESL character or the child. When we read The Color Purple the language demonstrates the narrator’s innocence from the book’s first word. This instantly primes us to care for and root for the character.

  Beyond that, no abstracts (no inches, miles, minutes, days, decibels, tons, lumens) because the way someone depicts the world should more accurately depict him. Unless, of course, you’re depicting a scientist who scores high on the autism spectrum.

  And no perfect newscaster language because the story should not sound fake, as if written by a writer.

  Lastly, avoid what Spanbauer and Lish call “received text.” Meaning, no clichés.

  Authority: Play to the Strength of Your Medium

  The pros: Books are cheap to write. They cost little more than time. And they’re cheap to produce and distribute, especially compared with films, which require huge consensus to come together. Books require a certain level of intelligence to consume so they’re less likely to fall into the wrong hands: a child’s, for example. Thus books can tackle topics not suited for children, whereas films can be so easily consumed that they must always self-censor.

  Books are also consumed in private. In most cases this means one person making the continued effort to read and thereby giving her ongoing consent. Contrast this with films, which might be shown on airplanes to both consenting and nonconsenting viewers. Films cost a relative fortune to create and therefore must be presentable on television to make a profit. Comics…comics and graphic novels can offer almost the spectacle of film, without the music. But their ease of consumption means they must self-censor.

  The cons: Books take an enormous amount of time and energy to consume, compared with films. Prose can’t convey the spectacle that film can. Most books fail to viscerally engage the audience. They might act upon your mind and emotions, but they seldom generate a sympathetic physical reaction. Compared with video games, books offer no way for the audience to actively control events. But video games are less likely to explore the full spectrum of emotion and ultimately break the audience’s heart.

  An aside: Among the strengths of film is its ability to depict motion. And as always action carries its own authority. Consider how many “movies” include crucial scenes that are resolved by a spectacular dance. Among them are Napoleon Dynamite, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (the tequila dance atop the bar), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Flashdance, Footloose, Saturday Night Fever…In contrast, duh, dance sequences are less effective in novels.

  So when choosing an idea for a book, make sure it’s an idea that only a book can best present. If it’s an idea that film, comics, or gaming can depict, why bother writing the book?

  If you were my student I’d tell you to write the most outlandish, challenging, provocative stories. Take full advantage of the complete freedom books provide. To not take advantage of that freedom is to waste the one chief strength of the medium.

  Authority: How Do You Get to Impossible?

  How do you convince a reader of something beyond his own experience?

  You start with what he does know, and you move in baby steps toward what he doesn’t. One of my favorite examples of this comes from the novel The Contortionist’s Handbook by Craig Clevenger. To paraphrase, he tells the reader to imagine waking up on a Monday morning filled with dread. Another stultifying week looms. Another soul-crushing day at work, doing something you’d never planned to do for the rest of your life. You’re growing older, your life wasted, your dreams lost. And then you realize it’s actually Sunday morning. That rush of relief…that flood of joy and bliss that fills you and buoys your whole body with euphoria, multiply that feeling by ten, and that’s how a Vicodin feels.

  Bravo, Clevenger. He takes a sensation we’ve all felt and uses it as a bridge to understand something we might not have experienced. He effectively communicates the physical effects of a painkilling drug.

  That’s using what I call “cultural precedent” and moving the reader from a common experience, through several intermediary, escalating examples, and ultimately arriving at an extreme the reader could’ve and would’ve never accepted if you’d presented it from the start.

  I love this form. In arguably my most successful short story, “Guts,” I tell a series of increasingly funny and unsettling anecdotes about failed experiments in masturbation. The first gets laughs. The second anecdote gets laughs but ends badly. The third gets a lot of laughs, so much laughter that I’m forced to stop reading aloud until the laughter subsides, but by then the audience has been charmed beyond the point of no return. That third anecdote takes a sudden turn and barrels full-speed into horror. If the audience had any idea where the story would end, they would’ve walked out at the beginning.

  Likewise, with my story “The Toad Prince” (originally titled “The Garden of Ethan” for obvious reasons), I move the reader through more and more extreme-yet-common examples of body modification. Each creates more dread until the final extended reveal.

  It’s a useful structure, stringing anecdotes together to illustrate a theme. And it gradually walks the reader from the believable to the incredible.

  Also consider how past stories create a precedent for new versions. Among my favorites is the “burning animal” story. One example is the story “Strays” by Mark Richard. Another is the anecdote about the burning mouse in David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames. On a book tour, as a publicist in Los Angles was driving me to the Skirball Center, she pointed out a house we were passing in the Hollywood Hills. She explained that friends had bought the house and couldn’t understand why it stank during cold weather. It jutted from a steep slope. Floor-to-ceiling windows seemed to hold up the flat roof. She said that the living room featured a gas fireplace where blue flames danced on an open bed of crushed white granite.

  As the neighbors eventually revealed, the previous owners had a cat. The cat had always used the crushed granite as a litter box, and each time the fireplace was turned on it became a stinking barbecue of broiling cat shit.

  I told that story to a publicist in Seattle, on the same tour, and she told me an almost identical version. Friends of hers had actually come home late one night and switched on the heat. Something, some screaming banshee demon, had exploded from the fireplace and set fire to the living room curtains. Their cat, it turned out to be.

  There it was as perfectly formed as myth: A new example of the burning animal story. Horrible and sad, but acceptable because existing cultural precedent made it familiar to the reader.

  If you were my student I’d tell you to read the story “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever. Then read “Call Guy” by Alec Wilkinson in The New Yorker. Then imagine some kid ordering the typical X-ray specs from an ad in the back of a comic book. The precedent exists for the omniscient device. The eyeglasses actually do allow the kid to see through clothing. The ring of familiarity will allow your reader to buy it. Only instead of sexy nakedness, the kid sees scars, bruises, the hidden proof of tragedy and suffering. His favorite teacher has a swastika tattooed on his chest. His best friend, the toughest boy in school, has a vagina…

  Use what the reader already knows to gradually move to the fantastic. The tragic. The profound.

  Authority: Subvert Reader Expectations

  The linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has said that readers value surprise above all else in a story.

  If you were my student I’d tell you to create a clear scene. Render the setting and physical actions without judgment or summary. Use simple Recording Angel as if you were a camera. Allow your reader to determine the meaning of the events. Let your reader anticipate the outcome, then—boom—spring the actual intention, the surprise.

  In chapter 20 of Fight Club, for example, we assume Tyler is bullying Raymond K. Hessel. As the scene unfolds, the reader assumes it’s a robbery and that Tyler is taunting and humiliating the man, and that Hessel is a victim. People love this scene because it turns out that Tyler is practicing a form of tough love. First, he finds out the dream career that Hessel has abandoned. Then Tyler reminds the man of his mortality. Lastly, Tyler threatens to return and kill the man if he fails to take action toward achieving his dreams.

  That scene was among the first I ever read in public, and the crowd response was jubilant. It ranks among everyone’s favorite scenes in the film.

  So direct and misdirect your reader, but don’t tell her the meaning of anything. Not until she gets it wrong in her head. In “Guts” the narrator describes the climactic scene (pun intended) in fine detail, describing how an impossible serpent is trying to drown him in the swimming pool. This misdirection allows the reader to realize the truth before the narrator does. The horror is mixed with laughter as the narrator remains in denial until it’s too late.

  Always, always, if you were my student, I’d tell you to allow the epiphany to occur in the reader’s mind before it’s stated on the page.

  Once on tour to England I shipped two thousand bacon-scented air fresheners in my luggage. These were cardboard squares printed to look like strips of bacon, and saturated in a bacon-smelling oil. They dangled from a string, designed for hanging from your car’s rearview mirror. The Customs agent opened my suitcase and saw these and didn’t blink an eye. I hadn’t a change of clothes because there was no room left. As the two thousand people arrived for a reading in London, I handed each an air freshener. They opened them, handled them. Soon the entire hall smelled of frying bacon.

  That night I read the story “Hotpotting,” describing how young hikers will soak in natural geothermal pools. The story plods along until the narrator steps outside one night and smells meat cooking. Historically, the danger is that drunken people will slip into spring-fed pools, realizing too late that the water is boiling hot. The actual case histories are heart wrenching, and I detail several, gradually establishing precedent. Once the narrator smells bacon, it’s too late. By then the auditorium stank of cooking bacon. Before they knew what the smell in the story heralded, people had jokingly rubbed the cardboard over their hands and faces.

  The truth didn’t have to be dictated. Any subsequent description would only confirm the dread they already felt.

  It was a wonderful night, that night in London.

  So never dictate meaning to your reader. If need be, misdirect him. But always allow him to realize the truth before you state it outright. Trust your readers’ intelligence and intuition, and they will return the favor.

  Authority: Subverting My Expectation

  One workshop, after my work had been rejected by some magazine or ten magazines or yet another agent had written to say he only represented “likable” fiction, Tom Spanbauer walked over to his bookshelf and studied the titles. He took down one book, then tucked it back. Pulled another, put it back, as if looking for the exact perfect book. At last he pulled a book off the shelf and gave it to me. “Read it,” he said. “Next week we can talk about it. It will help your work enormously.”

  Don’t look for me to name the book, a novel. A famous publisher, famous for only the highest-quality literature, had brought it out. The most prestigious imprint of a very respected house. The back of the dust jacket was crowded with the statements of famous writers praising the author and the work.

  The following week I read and reread it. An easy job because it hardly topped a hundred pages, but a tough read because the characters were hard-pressed and put-upon cornpone hound-dog types just scraping by in the burnt-over backwoods hills of wherever. They lived on a farm, eating the same grits for breakfast every morning. They did nothing exceptional, and nothing happened to them. Each time I finished it I felt angry about wasting more time for so little return. I hated the author for wasting my time. But mostly I hated myself for being too backward to appreciate this work of art documenting the lives of folks interchangeable with the folks I’d been raised next door to.

  The next Thursday I took the book back to Tom.

  He asked, “Did you love it?” He didn’t take the book from my hand, not right away.

  “The writing was beautiful,” I said. I hedged. What I meant was that the spelling seemed to be spot-on. Somebody had proofed the dickens out of this book.

  He pressed, “But what did you learn from it?” Still not accepting the book.

  “I don’t think I understood it.” I’d hated it. That, and I felt stupid for being too stupid to appreciate a book published by the smartest people in New York City. Clearly I’d failed. I felt like an oafish, uneducated yokel for not loving a book about oafish hillbilly yokels. It never dawned on me that maybe people in New York loved the book for the same reason that skinny white people love the film Precious. Because it makes them feel superior.

  Other students were arriving and taking seats around Tom’s kitchen table. But he wasn’t done. “What part didn’t you understand?”

  To fit in with the smart people, I lied. “You know,” I said, “I really loved the language.” If all else fails among the literati, always claim the language is beautiful.

  Tom reached out and took the book. Workshop commenced. Who read that night, who knows? After the last comments about the last piece. After Tom read a few pages of what he was currently working on. Some students left. The rest of us opened bottles of wine.

  It was Thursday night, my entire weekend rolled into an hour. We basked in the presence of this published author, living proof that a person could do this impossible thing. We drank, and Tom read. We argued about the Altman movie Short Cuts and whether it was true to Carver. Maybe we argued over Magnolia or The Player, both big movies at the time. At that I broke. “I hated it,” I said.

  Somebody, Monica Drake, maybe, asked, “You hated Short Cuts?”

  No, I hated the book Tom had lent me. “So I’m stupid.” It felt good to fall apart. The first step to being schooled toward some greater knowledge.

  If you were my student I’d give you that same book and force you to read it and feel like an idiot for not loving it. Then I’d hound you about whether or not you’d loved it.

  Because the next thing was, Tom smiled. “I didn’t give you the book to enjoy.”

  He hadn’t shelved it. The thing still lay on the table near his elbow. He looked at the cover and said, “This book is awful…” He grinned like he’d played a joke that never got old, no matter how many students he’d played it on. To me, he said, “I wanted you to see how terrible a book could be and still get published.” He slipped the book back into its place among the books on the shelf, ready to be given to the next hopeless writer.

  Authority: Submerging the I

  If you were my student I’d tell you to read the story collection Campfires of the Dead by Peter Christopher. It was Peter who taught me about submerging the “I.”

  The theory goes that stories told in the first person carry the greatest authority because someone assumes responsibility for them. The storytelling source is present, not just some omniscient writerly voice. The trouble is that readers recoil from the pronoun “I” because it constantly reminds them that they, themselves, are not experiencing the plot events.

  We hate that, when we’re stuck listening to someone whose stories are all about himself.

  The fix is to use first person, Peter taught me, but to submerge the I. Always keep your camera pointed elsewhere, describing other characters. Strictly limit a narrator’s reference to self. This is why “apostolic” fiction works so well. In books like The Great Gatsby the narrator acts mostly to describe another, more interesting, character. Nick is an apostle of Gatsby, just as the narrator of Fight Club is an apostle of Tyler Durden. Each narrator acts as a foil—think of Dr. Watson gushing about Sherlock Holmes—because a heroic character telling his own story would be boring and off-putting as hell.

  In addition, don’t screen the world through your narrator’s senses. Instead of writing, “I heard the bells ring,” write just, “The bells rang,” or, “The bells began to ring.” Avoid, “I saw Ellen,” in favor of, “Ellen stepped from the crowd. She squared her shoulders and began to walk, each step bringing her closer.”